You don't make Wikipedia easier to use by inventing new interaction paradigms.

Wikipedia is a tempting redesign project because many designers can't seem to understand how a website can be both ugly and highly useable.

I'm curious: why is Wikipedia in need of a redesign? George's reasoning here is that, "It hasn’t been changed or [refined] during the last 10 years. The web and its technologies has developed further and so [have] users." I'd argue that this puts the horse before the cart, though: Wikipedia's design shouldn't change simply to make use of new technologies unless using those technologies could make the site easier to use.

Figuring out the issues with Wikipedia's existing design are the real challenge: it's ugly, sure, but where does it fail functionally? There's a great article from 2007 in which a designer lays out where Wikipedia fails in terms of usability: http://www.raizlabs.com/graiz/2007/10/21/on-wikipedias-design-or-lack-thereof/

Some of the problems the designer identified in 2007 have been addressed, and others haven't, but it's interesting that the problems he identified are largely not very sexy: they really just involve moving navigation controls around, finding a better way to construct breadcrumb trails to enable users to locate themselves within the encyclopaedia etc.

I'd like to see a redesign in which the goal was to keep Wikipedia pretty damn ugly while at the same time making it more useable. That'd be a great challenge.

I think it still misses the point of wikipedia, absolutely nothing comes before content and ease of use for everyone.

Taking up huge real estate with a banner and having the table of contents and summary behind a button are probably the last things you want to do.

Also featuring unrealistic copy in a wikipedia redesign makes no sense.

Visually though it looks amazing and I really like the homepage design.

I've either been in this industry too long or not long enough, but the huge elephant in the room is that the websites that define the age of the web are unequivocally ugly.

On top of wikipedia theres:

• Craigslist, which single handedly took down the newspaper industry
• Amazon did the same for big box retail
• Reddit
• Google
• I could go on

Then facebook goes and "undesigns" itself so it can make more money.

For every 10 beautiful properties on the web, there's one big fat ugly turd that does the same thing but makes more money doing it.

I don't know how the rest of you feel about it, but it's something I've been thinking about lately.

If people never took risks/tried new things we'd still be taking Viking ships across the Atlantic Ocean.

Phrases such as ”beautiful typography“ don't really qualify as explanation for the design decisions.

this seems very much like a student project of "Redesign a property". Which I don't understand why professors give this as a project anyhow, or accept things that are quite obviously not addressing the needs.

What happened to students doing work for real clients at a reduced rate, the clients get better products, the designers get customer experience.

Otherwise yeah, this design misses the mark for me as well for most of what you guys already said about it not solving any real problem. I had a discussion on the #DN IRC with a young designer trying to do a new design for a website so that they would have something to put on the portfolio. Thats great, but thats putting the cart before the horse, why does the site need a redesign, what is the problem, THEN how do we solve it. Most of these wikipedia redesigns miss the problem.

It's very pretty, and I'd live to see wikipedia look like this. I particularly like the editing features.

But it's very image heavy. Lets put aside all the articles that have ugly images tat aren't suitable for this design and instead think about bandwidth: every few months wikipedia needs to raise more money, and I'm sure some cost is shipping all the static resources out to people.

So, to keep costs down, it seems like wikipedia would want a minimal amount of extraneous images on their most visited page - their home page.

this would be an interesting concept if they didn't call it Wikipedia.

I couldn't resist to watch that page and think on Teehan+Lax kind of website.

Aside from this, I think the examples are ok. But the frontpage to me looks like a disaster.

The designer’s presentation was pretty cool (the actual Wikipedia redesign itself aside). The click-to-drag-to-see-more-content thing was not as cool, though… but great presentation.

"Easier to operate with" = hover states showing content? What about on tablet? Mobile?

I really appreciate the thought that went into this, but it still misses the mark for me.

It's nice to look at it, but I can't help but feel like accessibility took a backseat to aesthetics. Wikipedia's ugly and utilitarian, but it's fast and accessible across a wide range of connection speeds and devices. This is what Wikipedia is about: Getting information to as many people as possible. Anything that hinders that is wrong, in my opinion.

I think there would be significantly more value in picking an "awkward" article and making stylistic changes to improve readability and possibly page performance.